


gossamer

by toujours_nigel



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Anne Bonnie/Max mentioned, Canon-Typical Behavior, Eleanor Guthrie/Max mentioned, F/F, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:53:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26770198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: The strange silk sussurates over her skin like Eleanor’s slippery bright-scaled mind flashing over her shins and surrounding her ankles, tripping her, holding her back, down, under the water.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	gossamer

A thing to remember: Max is not foolish. She would not have been where she is now if she were. There are many places and many ways for a sweet-faced, doe-eyed girl born in the slave-quarters to die, out in the mosquito-ringing dark of a plantation night. Max knows. She did not stand at a window peering in from hope that she would suddenly be made a daughter of the house. Not hope, but hunger.

So. Max is not foolish. But Max is given to flights of fancy, even now as she is forging a higher place in the world. Especially now. When Max was young she had had an uncle who worked the bellows at the smithy. Her room, with every window open to let in the salt-stinging air, still resembles the scalding closeness of the forge, the red gleam of iron spars becoming spades, picks, shovels. Max has small hands, every fingertip polished, elegant wrists rising into lean arms, rounded shoulders. She cannot at her present age lift the hammer that outweighed her at five, ten. In her eleventh year Max was sold to cover a gambling debt: a small thing her cousin did not care to leave waiting while he went to study at the Sorbonne. That uncle of hers might still be at the forge. Max’s mother might still be shuffling laden with trays between the sweltering kitchen and suffocating drawing-room.

Max wakes in the airy dawn, substituting the much-abused blanket for her thigh, wriggling carefully backwards out of Anne’s searching arm. Not a morning for lingering through Anne’s early grumbling. Not a morning to greet after sleep at all, with new rumours of their new governor coming in with every morning’s catch, but for Anne’s dogged determination. Max is wary of dogs, teeth, loyalty that she cannot reason loose from its moorings. Perhaps this is unfair to the dogs and to Anne. Max bathes, every morning, in unscented water still steaming from the kettle, boils herself a dull pink. Sunset colours, Jack called her once, fresh from the bath and pulling on her shift, a contradiction too radiant for his gloaming eyes. Jack talks a quantity of rubbish. In any case, he had not looked away.

After her shift and underneath it, stockings: silk, clocked, neither new nor hers, but right for her role as the new Eleanor for a new Nassau. Eleanor’s old stockings, to be very exact, from Eleanor’s chest from Eleanor’s office that passed into Max’s possession with the rest of Eleanor’s furniture and furnishings. Very few of Eleanor’s other articles of clothing have come into Max’s possession, which is in its way something of a relief. She does not intend to make a mockery of herself, mimicking Eleanor’s mode of dress, and Anne, better suited, would be insulted.

But, the stockings, dragged off one afternoon Max wanted more than a lifted skirt and parted thighs to push her face or hand under. Wanted and obtained instead, Eleanor naked and gasping underneath her ministrations, Eleanor laughing and scrambling back into her clothes, shooing Max out of her office when Captain Flint barged in past an irritated, apologetic Mr. Scott. The stockings, she supposes, were pitched in while Eleanor retrieved whatever map or book Flint had wanted to pore over, and never fished out. A week after, Eleanor had chosen Nassau over escape. A month after, Max had chosen Vane’s crew over rescue. Then pain, blood, death, exile; years and oceans between the Eleanor then and Eleanor mouldering in some English prison, between Max rolling these stockings down Eleanor’s thighs and smoothing them up her own, tying them beneath her knees with cloth tape: blue, ikkat of the same pattern as the sleeves and stomacher of the gown laid out for her. The yawning distance, measured in more than months or miles, between the women hiding their eyes from the same glaring sun and Max now, awake at dawn at a moment when Eleanor on the other side of the world may be dining or undressing for sleep. Perhaps both of them are in their shifts for a breath, a heartbeat, Eleanor’s busy mind thronged with plans for prolonging her imprisonment, escaping execution, and Max’s with tactics for her talk with Jack, strategies for tackling Vane and Captain Flint, their awful closeness.

But these flights of fancy, but Max’s inescapable bouts of sentimentality. The stockings are silk, thin, whisper-soft against her skin and clinging. They feel nothing like Eleanor’s hands, which were small and hard and rougher than Max’s, which could swing a grown man’s head around with a slap, leave bruises in a grip. They do not feel like Eleanor’s tongue or her cunt, and anyway Eleanor never lavished kisses on her feet or her calves and only ever rode her thigh and that rarely. Eleanor liked being fucked, filled with tongues and fingers and dildos and dicks, liked overwhelming and being overwhelmed, her mind like the Silver Ghost swept under the rising tide of desire. These stockings, rainwater-laundered and pressed among Max’s perfume sachets, should feel nothing like brazen Eleanor Guthrie, clear-spoken and cold-eyed. And yet, under her shift and petticoat and skirt, the cobweb closeness of her stockings feels like the glimmer of Eleanor’s bonefish brain, gleaming invisible in the sweetwater, flashing and gone.

Max clears her head and lines her eyes, drinks a careful cup of coffee while Idelle braids her hair, stains her mouth and steps into her shoes, then immediately out again to tap out a pebble. Out on the balcony, then the third step, the eleventh, the twenty-third, halfway across the road, the strange silk sussurates over her skin like Eleanor’s words and Eleanor’s gaze and Eleanor’s slippery bright-scaled mind flashing over her shins and surrounding her ankles, tripping her, holding her back, down, under the water. Max is a steady swimmer, unadventurous but unafraid, but Eleanor, Eleanor is a shark and the sea it swims in.

A flight of fancy, Max reminds herself, foolishness that has no place in her life, as Eleanor Guthrie has no place in Nassau, now that she’s imprisoned in England and Max has occupied her place in Nassau.

She throws open the door and enters the inn, climbs the stairs to what was once Eleanor’s office and is now hers, stockings whispering together between her legs, and the men fall silent: Jack and Vane, the others who would only rush to speak if they thought to trample over her into safety. It is supposed to only be Jack, one of their meetings masquerading as a companionable breakfast. Perhaps Vane, glowering in a chair too small for him, twirling his knife and darting glances at Jack.

“Good morning,” Max tells the room. “Am I late?”

Everyone except Vane turns to Jack, who brandishes a letter heavy with seals, purloined from some official courier. Jack has not slept, as Max ought not have slept, his eyes the colour of day-old bruises even with the shutters drawn.

Vane, because he is awful and impatient and has no sense of the dramatic, because he hurts as she hurts, says, “He’s bringing her with him. Eleanor.”


End file.
